YouAi is building a mind indexer. We are building a tool to help you turn your preferences, experiences, beliefs, biases—and everything else that makes you who you are—into a massive set of data.

You can read more about the mind indexer here. At the time of my writing this, we’re getting ready to let the first alpha users start playing with it. It is apparent to us that digitizing your mind is critical to unlocking the true power of AI and being effective in a post-AI digital world. It’s going to be a new habit in the way we engage with information technology. As each of us is constantly growing and changing, it is something we will all do—in some form or another—for the rest of our lives.

While the indexer forms the foundation of YouAi, the more interesting and disruptive work is happening at the application layer. YouAi is a platform for building the next generation of AI-enabled applications.

I want to share a high-level version of our roadmap for the next 18 months, as I believe it will help both in painting, directionally, where we are headed; as well as reinforce the foundational nature of the technology we are developing.

Today: Context Injection Into LLMs

• Today, ChatGPT knows nothing about you. When you ask it something, it has no choice but to give you the most generally-accessible answer. For example, if you ask it to explain a historical event, it has no idea whether you’re a grade-school student or a professor of history.
• However, you can tell ChatGPT more about yourself and it will begin to tailor its responses based on what it knows about you.
• When it comes to LLMs, we all know: the more data, the better. The more it knows about you, the more personalized it becomes.
• But what are you supposed to do? Type up a few paragraphs about yourself and paste it into the beginning of every session? That doesn’t make any sense. What would you write? How deep would you go?
• The first application available on YouAi—we call it Terminal—lets you experience what it would be like to interact with an LLM that already knows all kinds of different things about you.
• Right now, this is intended as a demo (which is why it looks and feels like a command line interface), but in short order we expect this “contextful” experience of ChatGPT to replace your usage of vanilla, contextless ChatGPT.

Summer 2023: Insights and People Matching

• The kind of dataset that YouAi is creating has never existed. But the technology to do interesting things with this kind of data certainly does exist (e.g., transformers, collaborative filtering, graph analysis, etc.).
• Within the first session, YouAi will be able to deliver insights about you—how you think, how you relate to the world, new frameworks for understanding yourself.
• YouAi will also be able to use this dataset—should you choose to opt-in—to connect you to interesting people. Friendship, love, collaboration, conspiracy…will all change in this new world.
• No service has ever been able to connect people at this level (matching and adjacency across millions of data points). Modern dating apps like Tinder and Bumble give you a handful of preferences to display (height, hobbies, a favorite quote, etc.). Some other dating apps (OKCupid, for example) might provide more “serious” surveys. NOTHING has ever gone as deep as we are about to go.

Fall 2023: Mental Model Comparisons

• The ability to easily compare your mind map with someone else will radically reshape the way humans communicate and collaborate.
• Imagine being able to meet someone new—whether a friend, colleague, or romantic partner—and immediately gain an intuitive sense for how they see the world. How much more effectively would you be able to communicate with this person? How much more rich might your interactions be?
• I’ve written more about this in: The Effects Of Mind Indexing On Human Communication

Early 2024: Launch of Third-Party Application Platform

• The real power of YouAi comes when we truly open the platform to third-party applications.
• It’s critical that we design a safe, private, and secure sandbox for these applications, where users understand—intuitively and precisely—how their data is being used.
• The future of AI is not chatbots—it’s not typing a message into a box and having a conversation with some ephemeral “being.” Sure, that might be a part of it, but at the end of the day it will only be a small piece within a larger refactoring of information technology.
• Your YouAi dataset (and, when appropriate, the aggregate dataset of humanity) has radical applications as they relate to content, recommendations, advertising, dating, education, collaboration, scientific and medical research, and so much more.
• The only way to truly unlock this innovation is by building an application platform. Our experience building Koji gives us a huge advantage in doing this.

Mid/Late 2024: Human-Centric Model and Personal Agent

• There is simply too much information and too many opportunities for any one human to curate them, let alone take advantage of them. This will only get worse as AI-generated content begins to dominate.
• Your AI becomes your proxy for the digital world. You need a “digital you” to be engaging with the world 24/7 and at “wire speed,” filtering out the noise and discovering opportunities you never would have found on your own.
• In this world, there are no more websites or services. Everything, in effect, becomes a “backend” that bubbles up to you through YouAi.
• I’ve written more about this in: Why Implicit Signals Are Not Enough To Build Proactive AI Assistants and will be writing much, much more about it in the future.

This is only the beginning of where we are headed, and is but a taste of a world where you can use your digitized dataset to personalize your interactions with AI. Expect to see deeper dives into many of these topics as they become more rendered, and, as always, we welcome any and all feedback. Feel free to get in touch!

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